the story of us
by Measured
Summary: Squall x Rinoa. These are the little moments that make up their story


**the story of us**

a/n:

This was written on Kenzi's prompting in snippets sent over aim.

This one's mostly fluff, there was a divergance of angst but that rather killed the mood, so there should be a connected story finished sometime or other.

and of course, as a disclaimer, I don't own them, I'm just borrowing them for a while.

the story of us (squall/rinoa)

SquallxRinoa. These are the little moments that make up their story

* * *

_i. darling, we go a-drowning_

She was spun silk, some exotic relic, a statue of a goddess out of place from his life. She smiled and he didn't care, no matter how many times she smiled or how many times he didn't care.

He didn't care about anything, his world was a steel-wool cocoon with silence and grey clouds. She was sunshine that had no right to warm his dislocated winters.

_ii. never a smudge line, never too much_

Her hair is wet and parted, now that the terrycloth turban was removed, it falls thick and ebony and damp around her slim line of shoulders. She's pale in this light, and her dark eyes sparkle in amusement. Her sundress has sunflowers on it with a blue background of sky and clouds to the distance.

She hums as she applies the nailpolish, baby blue, she got it when she returned home, she says. Each stroke is smooth, the blue easing over the flesh-colored nails. The smell is horrible, an acidic burn that makes his eyes water. She blows on her nails a moment before resting them on the table.

"You'll help me paint my toes, right?" she says, it's less an entreaty than a feminine command.

Her fingers curl into a stray bit of hair, her eyelashes are curled – funny that he notices this now, beyond the acidicness and the awkwardness that builds up deep inside him.

He wonders how he got there. For a moment he forgets that he is fighting a war and only knows the scent of her hair, strawberry passion dream shampoo.

_iii. suppose I never, ever saw you_

She will to this day say that their first date was in a dirty café with Zell emptying the entire freezer of hot dogs, bad country music playing on the radio.

The fan twists lazily, pushing the same hot air in some lover's slow dance across the ceiling.

She sat across him, but looked out the window and not at his face. (he thinks she's still watching him out of the corner of her eye.)

"These are the summer days when I used to think what it must've been like when my mother was alive, singing for crowds, in scarlet dresses with smoke and wine and encores." she says wistfully.

He doesn't answer.

She looks at him then, knowing and strange and enigmatic and female, like some fae creature with more gnostic wholly feminine knowledge than him.

"I want to sing one day, just like she did. In front of everyone... singing her songs... I don't know if I'll be any good at it, but I want to try."

" You'll come watch me when I'm a rich and famous singer, won't you?" She asks, smiling all the way to her eyes, the skin folding into smile lines (he's never seen anyone smile in such an unrestrained manner, like the most sincere summer he ever felt.)

"Won't you?"

He doesn't answer, but his throat almost squeaks an imperceptible yes.

_iv. when you see the joy in her eyes it makes you feel_

She dragged him to a kareoke bar the next city they went to. It was there she made the personal discovery that there were certain talents which genes skipped on her.

The bar is smoky around the kareoke machine, the air is littered with the scent of alcohol.

The ashtray in front of him has several cigarette butts, the place is decorated in wine red and burgundies and blacks, the patterns broken by the cigarette burns and discolorations on the floors, which no one sees in the lighting, dim enough to be almost blind.

As she belts out another song to the boos of drunkards and bar floozies, he thinks she looks pretty in spite of it all, hands on hips, daring them to throw her off before her damn song was over.

_v. i shall wake up and so shall you_

she's a dream he doesn't want to admit having, she's a dream he doesn't want to wake up from.

_vi. it's gruesome that someone so handsome should care_

Sometimes she says she wishes that her father wasn't so impossible and her mother wasn't so gone and that she knew all those long-lost cousins and great-aunts and nephews-twice-removed just so that she could drag him to every single family event and show all the people in her gene pool the guy she was willing to chase down to the ends of Balamb and back.

_vii. have you ever been alone in a crowded room?_

She used to pass in the upper class, brushing with minor royalty and the elite, her dresses paled in comparison, but she always seemed to steal the show.

When she was seven she took ballroom dancing lessons for a year, fell in love with her instructor and wrote love letters she never sent.

She never danced with her father, he was always too busy or away. Though she once dragged a stranger from his self-imposed exile and made him dance beneath the stars.

_viii. in case you were wondering_

_he loves me, he loves me not_... Sometimes she lands on "loves me" and sometimes on "not"

whenever it's "loves me" she thinks they'll have two kids, or maybe four, with names like Deirdre and Fabian and live somewhere where war is a faint memory, like the scar on her leg the time she ripped it bad enough for five stitches.

When it's "not" she tries again.

_ix. i never loved nobody fully, always one foot on the ground._

Being around her is a cure for inertia, it moves him enough to feel dizzy, spinning so fast that he feels like he could leave the ground. His stomach clenches and then lurches, he never thought love would make him feel like some carnival ride, a dizzying almost real fly through the air.

For once instead of not having any words, all the words well up into feeling and catch at the back of his throat, all wanting to get out at the same time.

_x. and i could not ask for more_

While he's putting on band-aids and patching superficial wounds, after battles she kicks her feet up towards the ceiling. She never seems to run out of that well of wonder that he never could find.

"When this is all over, you and me are going for ballroom dancing lessons," she says in between cringing from stinging peroxide and him trying to hold her steady.

"Ok." he mumbles, and she laughs in all her triumph, because she has done the impossible, and made him speak.

She thinks next she'll train him to say sentences, then maybe even more.


End file.
